Make Love
by lostlikeme
Summary: Daft Punk fic. The first, last, and only time Guy-Manuel tries ecstasy with Thomas is the night of Kurt Cobain's death. Loosely based on actual events. Warning for recreational drug use.


**Paris, France 1994**

Shouldn't this feel more incriminating? Guy-Manuel stares at the little pill shaped like a floppy disk in the palm of his glove, smaller than a fingernail. It looks almost as harmless as a piece of candy. He glances to the locked door and Thomas hugs his leather jacket close. Their makeshift recording studio is poorly insulated and drafty, but entirely their own.

The high ceiling is great for acoustics, but it looms around them like a funhouse mirror. It's been a year since they stepped into the light and became Daft Punk, but it still feels like every breath is new, and every beat is a fledgling born from their souls. The atmosphere is thick with quiet, grief anchoring them like statues in quicksand.

"Do you think this will make us more human?"

Thomas shrugs, but manages to look sincere. "It will make us more ourselves."

Guy-Man crosses his arms. "How do you know?"

"This is what we are made to do." Thomas is smiling behind his helmet, Guy-Man knows he always smiles too easily. "I can feel it in my hard drive."

The knowledge that Thomas has done this before doesn't take the edge off. Thomas has done a lot of things Guy-Man is grateful he wasn't privy to.

"We have a show tomorrow," Guy-Man reminds him.

They had one yesterday, too, where they stood in an overheated booth, bumping shoulders and trying not to blow a fuse behind the boom from the speakers.

"We always have a show tomorrow," Thomas says with a laugh. "Worry about that tomorrow."

Guy-Man hums his assent and the little tablet dissolves in his gold plated hand, download completing instantaneously. The file infects the core of his firmware, replicating like a virus. Guy-Man shudders at the feel of so many processes shutting down, one at a time until everything feels wiped clean, like a tech shoved a brand new motherboard inside his shell.

"I'm so glad we're doing this together," says Thomas, following in suit. He says that when he's drunk too, that he loves Guy-Man and he's nothing without him. "We can make an album ourselves," Thomas explains with a pixelated visor. "Alone in this bedroom."

Anything feels possible tonight, like they can grow life with a click from the computer, and build a masterpiece with nothing but the right ears and their bare hands.

"Me and you - we can put together all the musical parts, like cogs in a clock, little pieces that, that - that fit together like they were cast in resin…" Thomas stands beside him at the keyboard, bouncing on the balls of his feet, full of energy. "Do you remember my first guitar?"

"Of course." Guy-Man smiles. The sound bytes are burned into his RAM.

Thomas hunches his shoulders. "I sucked."

Guy-Man shakes his head. "We sucked." It rolls off his shoulders so easy he's almost jealous. "As if anyone ever got anywhere by being conventional."

They're already rolling when Thomas says he's going to pop another. Afterward, he reroutes an aux cord from the back of his helmet into the port on Guy-Man's chest. Electricity conducts between them and Thomas comes alive, glowing like an LED keyboard, nervous system searing his limited power. It's always been this way, with Thomas running the tech while Guy-Man feels around for the heart and nerve. Together, they almost make a whole person.

"I want to, to, to-" Thomas fumbles.

Guy-Man snickers. "Bang?"

Thomas crosses his arms and elbows him in the side. "Create emotion."

He unscrews the panel on his own shoulder with needlepoint precision, so he can run a wire directly from himself into the port on Guy-Man's helmet. The usb cord doesn't take the first time or the second, until Guy-Man scowls and redirects him, guiding his wrist so the pieces lock together and open a new current of data.

Communication becomes streamlined, but the monkey inside him struggles to decipher code and read the unspoken feelings lost in binary. Their whole existence is archaic, a prehistoric lust for touch entombed in technology.

"Hey," Guy-Man says, like the two of them have traded places. "Are you feeling it?"

Thomas nods; he has too much energy. "Feeling it all, so, so - all at once, right? Different sensations firing in my brain. When we tour - you think we will - don't you? When we tour it should be - " He waves his arms. "With lights, and from inside a glass pyramid. Can you see it?" He pauses while a cooling fan starts up. "À raconter ses maux, souvent on les soulage. Am I making sense?"

Guy-Man is filled with unfathomable fondness, the struggle of his own ventilation system drowned in the perseverance of his CPU.

By the time Thomas hooks himself up to the synthesizer, Guy-Man has created a steady thump with the drum machine, a hiss of air that rolls across the floor. The first repetition rattles the room, like the slow rise before the steep drop on a rollercoaster. They glance to each other between the heavy bumps from the bass, soft and unashamed, unlike the challenge hidden in conventional eye contact.

Thomas waves his arms when he speaks. "Do you think we - "

Guy-Man catches his wrist and pulls off the glove, skin hotter than the boiling engine inside his chest, and weaves their fingers together until their palms are flush. The update in his graphics card still can't catalogue the detail and warmth of real human flesh.

They turn back to the keyboard and Thomas laughs. "Everyone is a little gay on ecstasy."

The keys feels like an extension of his fingers and they can't stop talking. About living, about making music, about how there's a better song buried somewhere between the two of them. Guy-Man takes off the mask with a gasp, like a drowning man finally breaking the water's surface tension for air.

His hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat. Guy-man blinks and smiles, surprisingly bright when he wants to. For a split second, Thomas feels like kissing him.

"Take it off," Guy-Man tells him. "I feel alive." He spreads his arms through the air and twists out of his t-shirt. "We should have gone to a strip club."

Thomas loosens a little, too. "That's what we should call the song," he babbles. "Alive." The track stutters when he stops to gesture in the air. "The way it is to french house music is - EDM is what they're calling it now, electronic dance music."

"What kind of name is EDM, anyway?" Guy-Man scoffs. "DJ EDM, who is he?"

When Thomas tries to talk the audio stutters, and on the fourth attempt the driver crashes. The synthesizer short circuits behind him and explodes in a spray of sparkling white light. Thomas blanks, whirring as his processor tries to toggle twice as much data with half the speed. He freezes, voice garbled by static.

"C'est le son du futur," he says, before collapsing to the floor with a shudder, blue screened.

Panic is slow to settle, like a fog on a cloudy summer morning. Thomas convulses on the floor while Guy-Man watches, helpless. His body roams on autopilot, unsteady until his knees hit the floor. Thomas stills, and through the artificial calm Guy-Man gets a real taste of dread, the inception of the impossible idea that Thomas could die, and Guy-Man might have to go on existing without him.

He rips off his best friend's helmet, hands frantically roaming his body in search of the zipper tag. He wrenches it down with shaking fingers, tearing through the shirt to feel for the steady thud of his heart, skin like sheets of ice. The thought of hypothermia stalks him while Guy-Man hauls Thomas into the bathroom an inch at a time, ears popping like miswired circuitry.

The faucet roars as the tub begins to fill, fogging over their reflections in the mirror. He drops to a kneel and presses trembling fingers to his best friend's face, scrubbing over the stubble on his chin and running a thumb over his lip. Thomas looks beautiful in a commonplace, prosaic sort of way, like a dandelion growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Guy-Man braces himself on his elbows, craning his head until he can feel Thomas breathing against his face.

"Thomas," Guy-Man whispers, close to begging. "Help me out here."

Guy-Man stalls at the waistband of Thomas' pants before undoing the button and zip. Undressing another person proves a difficult task, embarrassment absent under the guise of emergency. His naked body is full of pores and hair and inconsistency, juxtaposed against the perfect white porcelain. They've been closer than this before, in a bed, and after bad breakups.

He shimmies out of his own clothes, locks his arms around Thomas, and hoists him up into the tub, half conscious. They sit together, shivering in the lukewarm water, close, but out of touch. Long after the music has stopped playing, Guy-Man can hear the erratic beat of his own heart echoing against the bathroom tile. They aren't robots anymore. Thomas is passed out, but breathing, and Kurt Cobain is dead.

Guy-Manuel turns off the tap, chin resting on his knees, as time slows and returns to a steady stasis. The details return in pieces of blinding fluorescent light; it comes as a reluctant surprise that there is more to their apartment, beyond the hallway outside the bathroom door.

Eventually, Thomas cracks open an eye. "Guy-Man," he slurs into the dark hair on his forearm. "I'm freezing."

"And sweating," Guy-Man adds, reaching for the damp pack of cigarettes on the toilet seat across from the tub. "Did you take too much?"

"Why?" Thomas asks. "Did you worry?"

"Of course," Guy-Man admits. "We still need to tour the planet in a pyramid."

He lights a smoke and takes a drag before passing it to Thomas with wrinkled fingers, soggy. Thomas can feel the music around his heart, as real as any organ, thumping against the reaches of his ribcage. His body succumbs to a tremor and his vision blurs like smeared fingerpaint.

So, they're human after all.

* * *

The decision is unanimous when they listen to what they recorded the night before. Guy-Man's lip curls and Thomas sighs.

"Ça me casse les oreilles."

Thomas shakes his head in agreement. "We have to scrap it."


End file.
